© 2015 The Texas Lawbook.
By Mark Curriden
(July 27) – Craig Budner’s travel calendar tells the tale.
One month, he was in Los Angeles, San Diego and New York. A few weeks later, he visited Melbourne and Brisbane. Then came trips to Seattle, Portland, Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh and Charleston, S.C.
Budner, a Dallas trial lawyer who has represented corporate giants such as Xerox, J.P. Morgan Chase, Hewlett-Packard and VarTec Telecom, has executive platinum status on American Airlines. He flies about 150,000 miles a year to defend these businesses in complex disputes across the globe. He has accrued more than six million miles in the air, which is the equivalent of 10 round-trip journeys to the moon.
A 1990 graduate of the University of Texas School of Law, Budner has one of the best jobs in international business law. He is a partner in the Dallas office of K&L Gates, a global law firm with more than 2,000 lawyers in 47 offices.
Earlier this year, the firm promoted Budner to the position of Global Integration Partner – a job that will almost certainly require him to travel even more.
“I love practicing law, representing clients and being in court, but I am thrilled to have this opportunity to help make this great law firm even more successful for our clients and partners,” says Budner, who represented Olympic athlete Marion Jones in the BALCO steroids scandal. He also played a key legal role in getting billionaire Ross Perot on the ballot for president in all 50 states in 1992.
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K&L Gates is a law firm founded in Pittsburgh in 1947 as Kirkpatrick & Lockhart. In 2005, the firm’s leadership started an aggressive growth strategy that included a series of mergers with other law firms across the U.S., including London-based Nicholson Graham & Jones and Seattle-based Preston Gates & Ellis.
In 2008, Kirkpatrick set its sight on Dallas-based Hughes & Luce, a 150-lawyer firm that was home to some of the best lawyers in Texas.
“We had A-list clients and great lawyers, but we were losing client market share to larger law firms,” says Budner, who had been a lawyer at Hughes & Luce since 1990. “Firms such as Jones Day could do things for clients in Washington, D.C. and New York that we couldn’t. Our clients were working in a global world but Hughes & Luce was limited to Texas.
“Clients needed lawyers and law firms with a larger platform than we could offer,” says Budner, who was on the executive committee at Hughes & Luce. “To me, it was a no-brainer to merge with a growing, thriving global firm.”
Within months of closing the merger with Hughes & Luce, K&L Gates also merged with 200-lawyer firms in Chicago and North Carolina. In 2013, K&L Gates combined with the Australian law firm Middletons.
“We have come together through a series of mergers of firms that dominated their regions,” Budner says. “I work with lateral partners to make sure they integrate quickly and seamlessly.
“My job is essentially connecting the dots across our platform,” he says.
Budner says he’s spent a significant amount of time during the past year working with the firm’s regional managing partners to understand their needs and to educate them on the capabilities of the firm’s other offices.
“It is vitally important that lawyers who join the firm as lateral partners know that they are not working in a silo,” he says. “We want to make sure that our culture remains truly collaborative.
“We want to reward lawyers who understand our mission is to provide superior legal services across a global platform,” he says.
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K&L Gates Chairman Peter Kalis said the firm created two leadership positions. He appointed Pittsburgh corporate M&A partner Janice Hartman to be the firm’s global development partner to spearhead growth and expansion.
Kalis said Budner’s mission is to develop and lead cross-office, cross-border and interdisciplinary initiatives that summon the collective resources of the firm to serve its clients.
“Our clients are facing a global pandemic of legal complexity in the 21st Century,” he said. “Craig, in his new role, has the breadth and depth of knowledge, the wisdom, the energy and the communication skills to shape our firm’s response to these emergent legal challenges facing our clients.”
Kalis said that Budner’s position is to help partners “fully understand their constantly changing perceptions of the marketplace and client needs.
“Clients don’t want advice from their law firms. They want solutions,” Kalis said. “Craig will be in the solutions business. When, for example, a client says that it has a recurring set of regulatory challenges around the world, Craig will help to shape an integrated global response calling upon the rich tapestry of legal disciplines and geographic venues that our firm has to offer.”
Kalis appointed commercial litigation partner John Garda to replace Budner as the administrative partner in K&L Gates’ Dallas office.
“We have our own challenges here in Texas, as competition for talent is extremely tough,” he says, noting that the firm has lost about a dozen lawyers during the past few months to competing legal practices.
“We have developed a growth strategy for Dallas and Houston and I think you will see our firm adding lateral hires in the months ahead in strategic practice areas,” he says.
Budner says that K&L Gates is not a top-down management structure.
“We cannot march into the offices of partners and tell them to change how to manage their clients,” he says. “Our lawyers are too good to be micromanaged. We just need to make sure that our lawyers are aware of the tools available to them.”
Budner says that 30 percent of the firm’s revenues involve legal work originated in one office but performed by lawyers in another office. He says modern law firms are basically project managers.
“Data has been underutilized in terms of predictive pricing,” he says. “We can use data to figure out how to price our services.”
Budner says he spends about two-thirds of his time on firm management efforts and one-third representing clients.
While Budner’s primary objective is the financial success of K&L Gates, he is deeply committed to community service and pro bono work. Last year, the Dallas Urban Debate Alliance recognized Budner with its Jack Lowe Sr. Award for his dedication to making competitive debate available to students in low-income and minority communities.
On the pro bono side, Budner’s most memorable case was his representation of Richard Donald Foster, who was convicted of the 1984 murder of Parker County convenience store owner Gary Cox. Budner represented Foster, also known as “Stoney Armadillo,” for 11 years.
“We were able to show that he clearly didn’t get a fair trial,” he says. “The prosecution withheld crucial evidence that the jury should have heard.”
Budner was a witness at Foster’s execution in May 2000.
“I remember he was strapped on the gurney,” he says. “It was like they were putting an animal to sleep.”
Foster thanked Budner and other lawyers at Hughes & Luce for representing him for more than a decade.
“He told us he loved us and that he had faith he was going to a better place,” Budner says. “It was a very emotional case and had a significant impact on my life.”
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